The SC conference continues to serve as the venue for announcing several distinguished professional awards, recognizing key contributions to high performance computing, networking and storage.

The Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award recognizes innovative contributions to high performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit of Seymour Cray. The award will be presented in a plenary session on Wednesday at 8:30am.

The Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award honors innovative uses of high performance computing in problem solving. The award will be presented in a plenary session on Wednesday at 8:30am.

The Gordon Bell Prizes recognize groundbreaking achievements for performance and scalability in several categories on genuine and specific scientific applications. In recent years, awards have been granted in four categories (not all are awarded every year):

Peak performance based on sustained floating point operations per second

Price per performance ratio measured in sustained flop/s per dollar of acquisition cost

Special accomplishment for innovation in scalable implementation

Scalability achieved through language constructs

Six finalists have been identified, from which one or more Gordon Bell Prizes will be awarded at SC06:

An electronic structure calculation from a group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory headed by Francois Gygi has attained over 200 Tflop/s on the full BlueGene/L system over a mix of FFTs, linear algebra, and first-principles potential calculations for high-Z metals, with attention to logical-to-physical mappings.

A lattice quantum chromodynamics simulation by a group at IBM headed by Pavlos Vranas has attained 12 Tflop/s on 32K BG/L cores, and studied QCD as an HPC benchmark that exposes memory and network latencies.

The structural dynamics of drop impact on a cellphone using an unprecedently detailed finite element analysis for such a system is the subject of a study on 4K nodes of BG/L by a group led by Hiroshi Akiba of Allied Engineering.

The Earth Simulator is the platform of choice for a group headed by Masahiko Machida of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, which has attained 18.7 Tflop/s on a Hubbard model to study superfluidity.

MD-GRAPE was employed in a molecular dynamics simulation of the formulation of amyloids in yeast prions, attaining 55 Tflop/s, in a collaboration led by Makoto Taiji of RIKEN.

Atsuhi Kawai of the Saitama Institute of Technology led a team that built an FPGA-based system to perform astrophysical N-body simulations using a hierarchical tree algorithm, at a cost of approximately 16 cents per delivered Mflop/s, about two-third of the cost of the most recent price-performance winner.

This year the Gordon Bell Prize finalists will be presented in a separate track in the technical program.

The Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards recognize the best of many outstanding papers in a highly competitive Technical Program. The honors will be presented in a special session Thursday at 1:30pm.

The Best Student Paper award went to "The Design Space of Data-Parallel Memory Systems", by Jung Ho Ahn, Mattan Erez and William J. Dally of Stanford University.

SC06 Video: Powerful Beyond Imagination: An astonishing new generation of powerful supercomputers is opening windows to discovery that were previously unimaginable. From physics to engineering to medicine; from the subatomic to the cosmic, these new tools are pushing back age-old barriers to understanding and are radically changing the field of scientific exploration. Are we on the brink of a new Golden Age of Science?